5 ms·

Dan Bernstein. Researched curve 25519 and provided reference implementations of x25519 & ed25519. Invented chacha20, such that it never branches on user secrets

Dan Bernstein. Researched curve 25519 and provided reference implementations of x25519 & ed25519. Invented chacha20, such that it never branches on user secrets to minimize side channel leakage. Along with poly1305, these form the foundation of almost all “modern crypto” from Signal to TLS v1.3. He wrote qmail as a superior MTA to the incumbent Sendmail. He’s even beat the US government in court.

Twisol 7y ago
And unless there's another software engineer named Daniel J. Bernstein out there, he also authored RFC 1143 documenting the Q Method of TELNET Option Negotiation [1], which prevents negotiation loops and nails down (in the shape of a state machine) exactly what behavior is good and proper for a Telnet peer. I referenced this document a lot when writing my own Telnet stack. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1143/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1143/
- tambourine_man 7y ago
  >…when writing my own Telnet stack. There’s probably an interesting story hidden in there.
  - Twisol 7y ago
    That probably depends more on the listener than on the story! I played MUDs for several years, at the same time that I was learning the ins and outs of programming. I developed some plugins for a popular third-party client called MUSHclient. The game I played also had a somewhat proprietary first-party client, and they used a spare Telnet option (one left unassigned by IANA [1]) to pass data from the server to the client to drive some extra graphical widgets on their client. I got involved in developing plugins that made use of that data, which led me to learning how to negotiate that option with the server and get the data I wanted. I eventually started developing my own MUD client, which is where the Telnet stack came in. Now, writing a Telnet stack is just something I do when I learn a new language. It's just large enough of a project to exercise some architectural and API-level concerns. [1] If you're curious, all of the formally allocated Telnet options are documented here: https://www.iana.org/assignments/telnet-options/telnet-options.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/telnet-options/telnet-optio...
sigil 7y ago
djb also wrote daemontools, ucspi-tcp, dnscache, djbfft, kicked off the field of post-quantum cryptography (pqcrypto), wrote the spec for `redo`, and came up with `find -print0 | xargs -0`. Definitely a legend!
sroussey 7y ago
It’s almost frightening that all modern crypto is converging on one persons work.

Twisol 7y ago

And unless there's another software engineer named Daniel J. Bernstein out there, he also authored RFC 1143 documenting the Q Method of TELNET Option Negotiation [1], which prevents negotiation loops and nails down (in the shape of a state machine) exactly what behavior is good and proper for a Telnet peer. I referenced this document a lot when writing my own Telnet stack. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1143/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1143/

tambourine_man 7y ago
>…when writing my own Telnet stack. There’s probably an interesting story hidden in there.
- Twisol 7y ago
  That probably depends more on the listener than on the story! I played MUDs for several years, at the same time that I was learning the ins and outs of programming. I developed some plugins for a popular third-party client called MUSHclient. The game I played also had a somewhat proprietary first-party client, and they used a spare Telnet option (one left unassigned by IANA [1]) to pass data from the server to the client to drive some extra graphical widgets on their client. I got involved in developing plugins that made use of that data, which led me to learning how to negotiate that option with the server and get the data I wanted. I eventually started developing my own MUD client, which is where the Telnet stack came in. Now, writing a Telnet stack is just something I do when I learn a new language. It's just large enough of a project to exercise some architectural and API-level concerns. [1] If you're curious, all of the formally allocated Telnet options are documented here: https://www.iana.org/assignments/telnet-options/telnet-options.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/telnet-options/telnet-optio...

sigil 7y ago

djb also wrote daemontools, ucspi-tcp, dnscache, djbfft, kicked off the field of post-quantum cryptography (pqcrypto), wrote the spec for `redo`, and came up with `find -print0 | xargs -0`. Definitely a legend!

sroussey 7y ago

It’s almost frightening that all modern crypto is converging on one persons work.